Victoria has recorded 1377 new locally acquired Covid -19 cases and four deaths.
File photo. A drive-through Covid-19 testing station in Melbourne in August. Photo: AFP
The new cases were identified from 67,789 test results received yesterday and take the state's total active cases to 12,711.
There were 30,985 doses of vaccine administered at state-run sites yesterday.
More tier 1 exposure sites have been listed in regional Victoria, with new listings in Morwell and Shepparton overnight.
Covid-19 fragments have also been detected in wastewater samples from Mildura.
Epidemiologist Tony Blakely from the University of Melbourne said he was "concerned" about the continued run of days with more than 1000 new cases.
"The virus is in specific populations, be that by suburbs, be that by age groups, and the other thing is we are seeing non-compliance. You don't have to look far to see that non-compliance," he told ABC News Breakfast.
"Both those things will be overtaken at some point by increasing vaccine coverage, but [it's] hard to tell exactly when."
Professor Blakely said despite the growing case numbers he had no doubts about the effectiveness of lockdowns as a strategy.
"If we'd let it rip last year we would've had severe mortality and morbidity and the rest of it, it's just that we haven't had the same luck as other places, we also had the quarantine failures with our second wave last year which were avoidable."
The health department revealed yesterday people who had received a negative test result after day 13 of their quarantine no longer needed to wait to be contacted by health officials before leaving quarantine.
NSW cases continue to drop
New South Wales has recorded 623 new community cases and six deaths for the 24 hours to 8pm last night.
Three men and three women died - a person in their 40s, three people in their 60s, one person in their 70s and one person in their 90s.
The state has 959 people with Covid-19 in hospital, 193 are in intensive care with 97 requiring ventilation.
Across the state, 88.4 percent of the population aged over 16 have received a first dose, 67.1 percent are fully vaccinated.
In Australian Capital Territory, there are 28 new community cases and two deaths.
Two more Canberrans, both women in their 80s, have died.
At least 16 of today's cases were infectious in the community and 14 are yet to be linked to a known source.
There are currently 16 people in hospital with the virus; five people are in intensive care, one requiring ventilation.
The territory recorded its highest daily case number of 52 on Friday and equalled it on Saturday.
There is one new community case in Queensland.
Research reveals areas hit hard by job losses
Melbourne's outer north-west and south-east have suffered the most economic damage in Victoria during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to research by the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) and the University of NSW.
The research showed the number of people on income support payments in September 2021 was 27 percent higher across the country than pre-pandemic levels.
That number peaked at 70 percent higher during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020.
In the Melbourne electorates of Calwell, Lalor, Gorton, and Macnamara, up to 6000 more people per electorate needed income support payments than pre-pandemic levels.
ACOSS chief executive Cassandra Goldie said the end of the Jobkeeper wage subsidy scheme earlier this year hit many communities hard.
"Last year average incomes actually rose, despite the deepest recession in almost a century," she said.
"But this year is a starkly different story. Covid has left a scorched economic path, particularly in areas that were more disadvantaged pre-pandemic."
ACOSS has called on the federal government to extend Coviddisaster payments, and raise other income support payments such as JobSeeker and Youth Allowance.
The Covid disaster payments, which cost the Commonwealth about $1 billion a week, are due to be phased out as states hit 70 per cent and 80 percent full-vaccination targets.
- ABC
